ABSTRACT

As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferating. This article asks what happens when a contagious and novel disease creates a context wherein neighbours recognise each other – by sight and by sound – as strangers. Marking the twentieth anniversary of Strange Encounters, we revisit Sara Ahmed’s claim that recognition in embodied encounters produces strangers as figures who are internal to community formation, but who remain outside of an imagined community. This claim enables us to parse the relational dynamics in pandemic time that produce neighbours as strangers through both visual and sonic registers. Ahmed’s theory helps to identify how disease opens opportunities to fracture and retract familiarity in ways that intensify police power and often racialised feelings of ‘stranger danger,’ in effect reordering neighbourly relations.

摘要

随着COVID-19席卷美国，对与COVID相关的担忧向警察发出的呼吁越来越多。本文询问当传染性和新颖性疾病创造一种环境时，邻居会通过视觉和声音将彼此识别为陌生人的情况时会发生什么。纪念陌生遭遇二十周年，我们重新审视了萨拉·艾哈迈德（Sara Ahmed）的说法，即在有形的相遇中获得认可会产生陌生人，因为他们是社区形成的内部人物，但仍在虚拟社区之外。这种说法使我们能够解析大流行时期的关系动态，这种动态关系通过视觉和声音记录器使邻居成为陌生人。艾哈迈德（Ahmed）的理论有助于确定疾病如何以增强警察的权力和经常种族化的“陌生危险”的感觉的方式为破坏和恢复熟悉程度开辟机会，实际上是在重新安排邻居关系。